Arne Duncan and Neoliberal Racism

Bill Quigley

31 Dec 2008

by Paul Street

Barack Obama likes to play basketball with his friend Arne Duncan, but does that make Duncan worthy of the nation's top education spot? If Obama's appointees are a reflection of the president-elect's own world view, this one is quite disturbing. Paul Street writes: "Privatization, union-busting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions - these are the interrelated hallmarks of private school graduate Arne Duncan's six and a half years at the helm of" the Chicago Public Schools.

Arne Duncan and Neoliberal Racism

by Paul Street

This article previously appeared on Znet.

"NO SCHOOL LEFT UNSOLD"

Educational justice advocates are understandably displeased with President-Elect Obama's appointment of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan to the position of Education Secretary in the next White House.

As the Chicago public school teacher Jesse Sharkey notes, "In the past couple years, Duncan has been turning public schools over to private operators - mainly in the form of charter and contract schools - at a rate of about 20 per year. Duncan has also resuscitated some of the worst ‘school reform' ideas of the 1990s, like firing all the teachers in low-performing schools (called ‘turnarounds'). At the same time, he's eliminated many Local School Councils (LSCs) and made crucial decisions without public input... Charter schools and test-score driven school ‘choice' have been the watchwords of Duncan's rule in Chicago" (Sharkey 2008). [1]

"Charter schools and test-score driven school ‘choice' have been the watchwords of Duncan's rule in Chicago."

University of Illinois at Chicago education professor Kevin Kumashiro notes that Duncan's Chicago policies have been "steeped in a free-market model of school reform" that feeds the drop-out rate, increases segregation, and does little if anything to increase student achievement. "Duncan's track record is clear," says Kumashiro: "Less parental and community involvement in school governance. Less support for teacher unions. Less breadth and depth in what and how students learn as schools place more emphasis on narrow high-stakes testing. More penalties for schools but without adequate resources for those in high-poverty areas." (Kumashiro 2008).

Privatization, union-busting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions - these are the interrelated hallmarks of private school graduate [2] Arne Duncan's six and a half years at the helm of CPS. It's all very consistent with the legacy of his predecessor and mentor, the roving urban schools chief and leading privatization enthusiast Paul Vallas [3].

It is little wonder that Duncan recently won the support of the leading Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks (Brooks 2008).

"EXAMINATION SOLDIERS" AND "DEAD WEIGHT"

Under Duncan as under Vallas, teachers in Chicago's predominantly black and Latino and highly segregated [4] schools have experienced relentless pressure to gear instruction towards all-powerful standardized examinations. Those tests determine which schools are honored as successful and which are shamed as "failures" and sanctioned - often with severe budgetary consequences - and even closed outright.

The "high-stakes testing" regime that has prevailed in Duncan's CPS often makes the inner-city classroom experience unimaginably oppressive. It privileges the authoritarian, mind-dulling search for the narrow-spectrum right answer over the democratic and mind-opening pursuit of the good question. It emphasizes rote, quasi-vocational memorization over the cultivation of intelligent, well-rounded citizenship capacities and creative vision. As Jonathan Kozol notes, it subordinates "critical consciousness" to the "goal of turning minority children into examination soldiers - unquestioning and docile followers of proto-military regulations" (Kozol 2004).

In Chicago as across the nation, test-based "skill and drill" instruction is offered mainly in impoverished Latino and black schools. "Affluent public or private schools," Asa Hillard III has noted, "rarely if ever use the scripted non-intellectual programs. This is the new segregation" (Hillard 2004).

"A common method for eliminating 'underachieving' students is simple expulsion."

Beyond its deadening impact on children's passion for engaged learning and critical thought, the testing regime drives many teachers away from urban schools. Those teachers prefer (richer and whiter) places where students and parents would never tolerate the "teacher-proof" curriculum that predominates in inner-city schools.

The testing regime is also intimately related to an ongoing black and Latino graduation rate crisis [5] in Chicago's public schools. High-stakes testing creates a powerful school incentive to raise scores in the easiest possible way - by pushing low-scoring students out. Early in the Duncan era at CPS, an assistant principal of one inner-city Chicago high school told reporters that his school was "penalized for these [poorly performing, that is, poor] kids. We want quality more than quantity. If that means removing dead weight, we will remove dead weight'" (Moore 2003). One frequent practice in Chicago high schools under Duncan has been to drop students from the school's roster for poor attendance and then refuse their request to be reenrolled. Another common method for eliminating "underachieving" students is simple expulsion (Orfield et al., 2004). Another major test-score booster is educational gentrification - the closing of neighborhood schools serving primarily poor and minority students and their re-opening as "new schools" with more privileged students recruited from upscale blocks and across the city (a topic to which I turn in greater detail below).

"A NEW FORM OF TRACKING"

The CPS under Vallas and Duncan has maintained "a variety of differentiated programs, schools, and instructional approaches" that reflect and deepen sharp divisions of race and class. As post-industrial "global Chicago" has increasingly seen its labor market bifurcated between privileged, higher-end knowledge workers tied to the world economy and an expanding mass of low-wage service workers (Sassen 2004), the city's public schools have provided one type of educational experience for children from the disproportionately white first group and another for children from the disproportionately black and Latino second group.

The elite category of educational programming includes "elementary magnet schools," "regional gifted centers," "grade seven to twelve Academic Centers," "traditional magnet high schools," "International Baccalaureate Programs," College Prep Regional Magnet High Schools," and "Math, Science and Technology Academies."

These more privileged schools and programs within CPS enjoy superior resources and practices. They commonly exhibit a relaxed and open pedagogical environment that encourages free inquiry, critical and experimental thought, autonomous and democratic expression, and the collective sharing of ideas and knowledge. Often permitted to bypass desegregation rules in picking their selective and disproportionately white student base, they are predominantly located in and draw from upper-income and often gentrifying areas where "good schools" are considered critical "real estate anchors" required to keep and to attract middle- and upper-class residents. "One of the major complaints of teachers in regular high schools," DePaul University (Chicago) education professor Pauline Lippman finds, "is that the magnets and specialty programs have drawn away most of the high-achieving students, leaving everyone demoralized as neighborhood high schools are perceived to be ‘for losers' (as one teacher put it)."

The non-elite category includes vocational high schools deploying "scripted direct instruction" methods using "teacher-read scripts" and teaching "mastery of a fixed sequence of skills" in accord with "behaviorist" teachings on the supposed limited capacities of "economically disadvantaged students." It also includes "Education to Career Academies" with a strong "vocational" emphasis, and highly regimented military schools that enforce extreme discipline and are run by officers from the United States Armed Forces.

The second and inferior category of "military and prison prep" schools and programs are disproportionately located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods. They are characterized by constricted, monotonous, and deskilled teaching and learning methods, repressive "Zero Tolerance" discipline approaches that produce extreme levels of suspension and expulsion, a ubiquitous police-state presence (replete with metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs), high teacher burnout and turnover, and the steering of students along a narrow "basic skills" track designed to place them in entry-level positions at the bottom of the city's occupational pyramid. There is little place in the city's black schools and its expanding number of remedial and vocational programs for "learning self-determination, collectivity, and critical analysis of the world and one's place in it, or self-control for ethical ends."

It all amounts to a "new form of [racialized] tracking" in which "the academic track is more differentiated from the other tracks and more spatially separate than in the old comprehensive high school" (Lippman 2004, 42-57).

"I LOVE THE SENSE OF DISCIPLINE"

Here is a recent newspaper account of military-style public schooling in Chicago:

"Samantha Acevedo stands at attention while the chief yeoman stares her down and orders her to recite the Navy's 5th General Order from memory."

"Dressed in a uniform of black pants and a crisp, white button-down shirt, she answers in a near-whisper: ‘To quit my post only when properly relieved.'"

"She is no raw Navy recruit being put through basic training, but a 15-year-old freshman at Hyman G. Rickover Naval Academy, one of Chicago's five military-style public schools. About 1,800 students in all are enrolled in the schools."

"The nation's third-largest district embraced the concept in 1999, and now has more such academies than any other school system in the nation.

"The Chicago district runs the academies, and the curriculum is similar to that of regular high schools. But the students are required to enroll in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, operated by the Pentagon, and the regimen includes uniform inspections, drills, and lessons in military history."

"...At Rickover, named for the admiral considered the father of the nuclear submarine, a student ‘watch' is posted at the entrance, standing attention when the principal passes. Students wear military-style JROTC uniforms and are called ‘recruits' until they earn the title ‘cadet.' Each class starts with a roll call in which students answer ‘On board, sir!'"(Tareen 2007).

Chicago's five military high schools, located in black ghetto neighborhoods and Latino barrios, are dedicated to molding youth into obedient citizens who know how to take directions and display a strong "work ethic" and a related eagerness to please employers and customers. The military schools, Lippman notes, "single out some youth for their successful accommodation to a system of race and class discipline and set them apart from others criminalized" by the CPS' "Zero Tolerance" policy and by the city's anti-gang law (which permits the police to forbid the gathering of more than three black youth in one place). "Those newly disciplined by the army" in the city's military high schools "are explicitly defined by their difference from others like them whom are, by implication, out of control and menacing."

By Lippman's significant observation, "the fact that the military programs can turn [black Chicago] youth into models signifies that it is the youth (and their families and communities), not racism, not economic policies of disinvestment, not real estate developers, not demonization in the media, that are responsible for their lack of a productive future."

By targeting black and Latino youth for special authoritarian discipline, the military schools help make Chicago seem "safe" for growing white "upscale enclaves" (Lippman 2004, 57-60, 69) - another reflection of a highly racialized white-suburban "moral panic over the city" (Macek 2006) that helps drive the long march of urban black and Latino youth into mass incarceration facilities that function as leading job-providers in predominantly white rural communities (Street 2002).

"The military calculates (with reason) that many inner-city youth have nowhere better to go."

At the same time, Chicago's military high schools function as a recruitment tool for Pentagon authorities. The Armed Forces are under pressure to find human chattel for Superpower's colonial wars and to staff a giant global empire that includes more than 770 bases located in more than 130 countries. And the military calculates (with reason) that many inner-city youth have nowhere better to go than the military to make a living.

We can be sure that the Pentagon high schools' "military history" courses refuse to tell basic truths about the long record of U.S. imperial criminality, including (for example) the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn the century, the murder of 2 to 3 million Indochinese in the 1960s and 1970s, and the killing of more than 1 million Iraqis since March of 2003.

By the fall of 2009, Chicago will become the first school district in the country to host military high schools from all four branches of the U.S. military: Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines (Tareen 2007). Chicago has more military high schools than any school district in country (Sharkey 2008).

Duncan, who claims to "oppose war" in accord with a Quaker upbringing in the liberal Chicago University neighborhood of Hyde Park, has refused to heed teachers and parents who protest the militarization of public education (Sharkey 2008). Speaking of his Pentagon high schools after the briefly protested introduction of the "Rickover Naval Academy" in Chicago's North Side Senn High (largely Latino), Duncan said that "These are positive learning environments. I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline" (quoted in Tareen 2007).

Duncan's military high schools could contribute many recruits to Obama's promised expansion of the criminal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and to related deadly U.S. incursions into Pakistan.

"REN 2010": ABANDONING "UNDERPERFORMING" (POOR) KIDS "WHO NOBODY WANTS"

As part of the drive to help make Chicago "safe" for the business and professional class, Duncan closed thirteen predominantly black neighborhood schools (seven elementary schools and six high schools) between 2002 and 2006. He fired those schools' unionized teachers and staff as punishment for low test scores - the core definition of "poor school performance" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

His initial closings anticipated the 2004 unveiling of what the city labeled "Renaissance 2010" - an ambitious plan to close 75 "underperforming" neighborhood schools and replace them with 100 smaller and "restructured," non-union charter and contract schools.

"Underperforming" is code language for poverty-afflicted. As serious educational researchers have known since at least the federal Coleman Report, released more than thirty-three years ago, concentrated student poverty is by far and away the main predictor of low marks on standardized examinations (Rothstein 2004).

The "Ren2010" plan was immediately embraced by the city's longstanding downtown corporate "leadership" organization the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which pledged to raise $25 million on its behalf. Renaissance 2010's board, appointed by the city's business-friendly Mayor Richard M. Daley, was loaded with big-time corporate class chieftains, including the Chairman of McDonald's and the CEO of Northern Trust. These and other leading capitalists are drawn to Chicago "school reform's" promise to hand public education over to supposedly all-knowing masters of the so-called "free market," shorn of obnoxious input from teacher unions, parents, students, and community members.

"Duncan's new schools limit the number of community students who can be admitted and set an enrollment deadline."

Numerous local parent, education, and community activists have claimed that the city's much touted "school reform" plan advances racial displacement and real estate and commercial gentrification. Consistent with this charge (or observation), the new and purportedly "improved" schools that have replaced closed ones cap the number of students who can attend from the local communities in which they are often set. Of the 52 new charter and contract schools Duncan opened (even as total city enrollment fell) between 2003 and early 2006, the great majority emerged in neighborhoods where upper-end real estate development was coming in and low-income residents were being priced out. Most of the new schools were and remain open to applicants across the city and do not reserve seats for local students displaced by closings. Unlike neighborhood schools where any child residing in the local attendance area can enroll at any point during the school year, Duncan's new schools limit the number of community students who can be admitted and set an enrollment deadline. Once local enrollment targets are met, the new charter and contract schools are not obligated to let any more local students attend. As the educational monthly journal Catalyst Chicago has noted, poor and "troubled families are less likely to research and apply for the new ‘choice' schools." Their children end up back in a shrinking number of old and relatively neglected neighborhood schools that are loaded down with what one Chicago high school principal calls "those kids who nobody wants'" (Paulsen 2004; Catalyst Chicago 2005; Lippman 2005; Lippman 2006; Duffrin 2006; Mullman and Hinz 2006).

This and other selective forms of socioeconomic "creaming" help explain how some of Duncan's charter and contract schools have been able to score modest standardized achievement gains in recent years.

"I'M TRYING TO IMPROVE THE PORTFOLIO"

Anyone who doubts that Duncan is fully on board with the corporate schools agenda should read a recent essay by Left education professors Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman. The essay, which merits lengthy quotation, includes some remarkable reflections on a chilling speech that Duncan delivered to business elites and privatization activists on "Ren 2010" last May. According to Giroux and Saltman, (at least one of whom appears to have infiltrated the top-down gathering where Duncan spoke last spring):

"One particularly egregious example of Duncan's vision of education can be seen in the conference he organized with the Renaissance Schools Fund. In May 2008, the Renaissance Schools Fund, the financial wing of the Renaissance 2010 plan operating under the auspices of the Commercial Club, held a symposium, ‘Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education,' at the exclusive private club atop the Aon Center. The event was held largely by and for the business sector, school privatization advocates, and others already involved in Renaissance 2010, such as corporate foundations and conservative think tanks. Significantly, no education scholars were invited to participate in the proceedings, although it was heavily attended by fellows from the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation and featured speakers from various school choice organizations and the leadership of corporations. Speakers clearly assumed the audience shared their views."

"He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change."

"Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a ‘movement for social justice.' He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, ‘I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio.' He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. ‘We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private,' he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform..."

"...[Duncan's] statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are de-unionized)...Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions."

It "became clear," Giroux and Saltman ad, "that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform."

Sadly, the next Education Secretary's "vision" portends "the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace" (Giroux and Saltman 2008).

"IF THE ONE WOULDN'T TRUST HIS KIDS TO DUNCAN..."

The record of class- and race-based educational apartheid in Richard M. Daley's Chicago is incomplete without reference to the special advantages enjoyed by the disproportionately white children who attend the city's elite private schools. The educational privileges granted to children in Chicago's best public schools are probably slight compared to those bestowed upon students in the Near North Side's "baby Ivy" schools (Francis Parker and the Latin School) and in the South Side's University of Chicago Laboratory School (in Hyde Park), where parents pay $30,000 and up each to prepare their children for elite private college careers.

Interestingly enough, Obama has not enrolled his children in the Chicago Public Schools, even though some of the district's "better" (high-scoring/higher socioeconomic status) public schools are located in his Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood. As Greg Palast notes, Obama "refused to send his kids to Duncan's public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan's [inner-city skill-and-drill] methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous)...If The One won't trust his kids to Duncan," Palast asks, "why is he handing Duncan ours?" (Palast 2008) [6]

Part of the answer is that Duncan is a friend of Obama's - a regular basketball buddy for the nation's first gym-rat president. Duncan is also a good pal of one of Obama's closest companions and sponsors - the leading investment capitalist John W. Rogers, founder of Ariel Capital Management Inc. (Prior to working for the CPS under Vallas, Duncan ran an educational policy foundation for Rogers.)

Cronyism aside, Duncan fits the broader centrist and corporate- and military-friendly agenda that Barack "Empire's New Clothes" Obama has been hired to advance under the cover of pseudo-progressive rebel's clothing (Street 2008).

Presidential candidate Obama consistently sought to curry favor with the business elite and to win crossover Republican support by trumpeting school "choice" and proclaiming his willingness to scapegoat teachers for impoverished students' poor test scores. He embraced teacher-blaming "merit pay" schemes and spoke with pride of how his embrace of charter schools showed that was not beholden to "ideology" and his liberal base (Fitzgerald 2007; Politico 2008).

Obama has never called for repeal of the widely hated No Child Left Behind Act, which sets poor and minority schools up for privatization by mandating absurdly unattainable test-score improvements. Like Duncan, he criticizes the bill only as an "unfunded mandate," generally ignoring the deeper problem that it reinforces pedagogical apartheid (test-based instruction for poor and mostly minority kids and critical thinking for privileged children at elite private and public schools) and denies the primary role of concentrated poverty (Rothstein 2004) in producing low student achievement.

Progressives should be miffed but NOT surprised at the Duncan appointment. It fits perfectly well with the "deeply conservative" [7] Obama's corporate-friendly and centrist nature, something he has been making clear to careful observers not just during the imperial transition but across his entire political career (Street 2008A; Reed 1996; MacFarquhar 2007).

Paul Street's books include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007), and, most recently Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), order at www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987. Paul, a K-6 graduate of the University Chicago Laboratory School (it was all public schools after that), can be reached at [email protected].

NOTES

1. "Charter schools" are designed and managed by independent non-profit organizations. "Contract schools" are run by for-profit corporations. In both cases, management generally operates without union contracts (for teachers and service workers) and without interference from Local School Councils (LSCs). Under the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act, the city's K-12 publish schools were required to set up governing LSCs made up of the principal, teachers, parents and community members. Elementary school LSCs consist of 11 voting members: Principal (1 vote), Parent Representatives (6 votes), Community Representatives (2), Teacher Representatives (2). High school LSCs consist of 12 voting members: Principal (1), Parents (6), Community (2), Teachers (2), Students (1).

2. Duncan is a graduate of the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (K-12) and Harvard University (bachelor's degree).

3. After leaving the CPS (with his protégé Duncan installed in his old job) in the spring of 2001, Vallas became public schools chief in Philadelphia, where he presided over the largest U.S. experiment ever in privatized management of schools. He turned 40 schools over to outside management by for-profits (especially to Edison Schools, Inc.), nonprofits, and universities. Vallas is currently superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina was viewed by civic authorities as a great opportunity for school privatization.

4. Fifty years after the nation's highest court held (in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision) that "separate is unequal" and forty years after local civil rights activists held large demonstrations against segregated schooling in Chicago, the average black Chicago K-12 student attended a school that was 85.5 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four Chicago public schools, equaling nearly half (47 percent) of the city's 579 public elementary and high schools (excluding the small number for which race data are unavailable) were 90 percent or more African American and 173 of those schools - equaling 30 percent of all public schools in the city - were 100 percent black. Just 112 or 19 percent of the city's public schools were technically "integrated" (15-70 percent white) and just 57 or 10 percent were a third or more white. More than half (51 percent) of the city's schools were "predominantly black" by the city's definition of 70 percent and above. See Street (2007), pp. 177-180.

5. four-year graduation rates for Latino and black Chicago high school students two years in 2003 were 51 and 42 percent, respectively. Nearly 6 in 10 African-American 9th graders did not graduate with a regular high school degree within four years in Chicago Using various deceptive statistical practices to spin his system's drop-out problem in a more favorable light, Duncan and the CPS have never acknowledged the depth and degree of the minority graduation crisis in Chicago - a crisis his policies have served to exacerbate. See Orfield et al. 2004.

6. In the late summer of 2001, then state senator Barack Obama appeared with Arne Duncan at The Chicago Urban League (CUL, where I was then employed) on the first day of the public school year. Speaking to a cadre of reporters, Obama, Duncan, and CUL CEO James W. Compton lectured inner-city parents on their personal responsibility for taking their children to school and for encouraging and staying involved in their children's educational lives. The black Chicago Third Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman stood up to say that she had put all of her children through the city's public schools. Tillman than angrily noted that (a) Duncan was a private school graduate from the University of Chicago Laboratory School (K-12) through Harvard; (b) that Obama was a private school graduate from the elite Hawaiian Punahou Academy (high school) through Columbia University and Harvard Law; and (c) that Obama was spending tens of thousands of dollars each year to send his daughters to the elite and private University of Chicago Laboratory School in Hyde Park. Obama, Tillman argued, "has no business lecturing anyone on the need to take their kids to the public schools." Tillman's outburst was much appreciated by the CUL's clerical staff, many of who had been forced to attend the event.

7. For a carefully researched portrait of Obama as "deeply conservative," see Larissa MacFarquhar (2007). For an early (at the very beginning of the President Elect's political career) account of Obama's ideological orientation as "vacuous to repressive neoliberal," see Adolph Reed, Jr. (1996).

SOURCES

David Brooks 2008. "Who Will He Choose?" New York Times, December 5, 2008.

Catalyst Chicago 2005. "First Renaissance Schools," Catalyst Chicago (February 2005)

Elizabeth Duffrin 2006. "Promise of New Schools Not Met" and "Slow Progress Amid Strife," Catalyst Chicago (March 2006).

Thomas Fitzgerald 2007. "Obama Tells Teachers he Supports Merit Pay," Philadelphia Enquirer (July 5, 2007), read at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/8335627.html.

Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman 2008. "Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling," Truthout (December 17, 2008), read at http://www.truthout.org/121708R.

Asa Hillard III 2004. Comments in "Beyond Black, White, and Brown," The Nation (May 3, 2004)

Jonathan Kozol 2004. "Educational Apartheid Fifty Years After Brown," The Nation (May 3, 2004).

Kevin Kumashiro 2008. "Duncan Wrong Education Choice," Atlanta Journal-Constitution (December 23, 2008).

Pauline Lippman 2004. High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).

Pauline Lippman 2005. "‘We're Not Blind. Just Follow the Dollar Sign.'" Rethinking Schools, volume 18, no. 4 (Summer 2005).

Pauline Lippman 2006. "Educational Ethnography and the Politics of Globalization, War, and Resistance," Substance, The Online Edition: The Newspaper of Public Education in Chicago, retrieved October 10, 2006 at www.substancemews.com/mambo/content/view/203/79.

Stephen Macek 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

Larissa MacFarquhar 2007. "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The New Yorker (May 7, 2007).

Don Moore 2003. "Crisis" (Chicago, IL: Designs for Change, October 2003).

Jeremy Mullman and Greg Hinz 2006. "Mayor Daley's School Plan Falls Behind," Crain's Chicago Business (February 06, 2006).

Gary Orfield et al. 2004. Losing Our Future: How Minority Children Are Being Left Behind by the Graduate Rate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2004),

Greg Palast 2008. "Obama Slam-Duncans Education" (December 16, 2008) InfoClearingHouse, read at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21481.htm.

Amanda Paulsen 2004. "Chicago Hopes: ‘Maybe This Will Work,'" Christian Science Monitor, 21 September 2004.

Politico 2008. Interview with Barack Obama by Politico (February 12, 2008), read at http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0B213312-3048-5C12-000E0262A76D6B18.

Adolph Reed Jr. 1996. "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000).

Richard Rothstein 2004. Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Educational Achievement Gap (Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004).

Saskia Sassen 2004. "A Global City," pp. 15-35 in Charles Madigan, ed., Global Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Council of Foreign Relations and University of Illimnois Press, 2004).

Jesse Sharkey 2008. Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda," CounterPunch (December 18, 2008), read at www.counterpunch.org/sharkey12182008.html.

Paul Street 2002. The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002).

Paul Street 2007. Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).

Paul Street 2008. "Barack Obama: The Empire's New Clothes," Black Agenda Report (November 12, 2008), read at www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=879&Itemid=1

Paul Street 2008A. Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008)

Sophia Tareen 2007. "Chicago Leads in Public Military Schools," USA Today, November 2, 2007, read at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-02-2738760309_x.htm.

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